Sunday, January 10, 2016

Watching Spotlight,
the Oscar-bound movie about The Boston Globe’s investigation of Massachusetts clergy
who raped children, and reading about employees of St. George’s School in
Middletown, Rhode Island, who sexually abused students has prompted memories of my 1960s and
‘70s childhood.

Only luck, I have concluded, spared me and my
friends the fate of these many victims here in New England and others like them
across America.

Back then, we were youngsters in a world where
authority was accepted without question, and where certain authorities with sanctioned
access to children – clergy, teachers, coaches and scout leaders among them –
were almost god-like in stature. In the case of priests, they may as well have
been God, at least in the view of adults like my mother, a daughter of Irish
immigrants who was born and raised in Boston and who brought up her children with
the Baltimore Catechism. You won’t find a hint that clergy could be anything
but pure in that book.

It was a world of blind obedience and absolute
trust of elders. And it was a world where monsters cloaked in authority roamed
free, although no grownup warned us of that.

A resident of Wakefield, Mass., a suburb of
Boston, from birth until college, I spent eight years at Saint Joseph parochial
school and was an altar boy during much of that time at the parish church, which
was under the control of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. The priests I
knew best at St. Joseph were good stewards, and one remained an acquaintance for
decades. But another, William F. Maloney, who I saw only at Mass, was later publicly
accused of sexually abusing someone in the late ‘60s at another parish in North
Reading, four miles from my home.

A ten-minute drive would have brought me to another
church, St. Patrick’s in neighboring Stoneham, where my parents could just as
easily have settled when buying their first house outside the city. I would
have been an altar boy there -- with Bryan Schultz, who was repeatedly and
grotesquely abused by Paul R. Shanley, one of the worst serial pedophile priests,
assigned to St. Patrick’s for seven years in the 1960s. Father James R. Porter,
another monster, was briefly with Shanley at the Stoneham parish in 1967.

As the investigative reporter played by Mark
Ruffalo declares in Spotlight: “It
could have been you! It could have been me! It could have been any one of us!”

We did not need religion to be near an apparent molester.
A local journalist who regularly visited schools, the YMCA, youth athletics and
other places was said to have a creepy interest in boys, touching them
inappropriately and sneaking into their tents after nightfall on scouting
trips. Neither I nor my close friends were scouts, but we heard these stories so
frequently we held them to be true. We never told an adult, for who would have
believed a kid with such a story?

In eighth
grade, I won a scholarship to St. John’s Prep, in Danvers, Mass., an
all-boys school run the the Xaverian Brothers where I would receive a superb education. I remember meeting
with headmaster Brother Ricardo before I enrolled; he wanted to personally
share his delight at my good fortune with me and my parents. He seemed a warm, charming
man who was devoted to God and the well-being of children. And that remained my
perception during my years at St. John’s.

I was a day student, and thus never saw Brother
Ricardo outside the classroom context. But boarders did. They saw also another
brother who lived among them in one dorm – and they told stories of him
inviting them to his room for illicit cigarettes and requests to shower naked with
him in his private bathroom. To my knowledge, this man was never formally accused
of sexually abusing a student. But Brother Ricardo, whose given name was
Richard Kerressey, was.

In 1994, a former student accused Kerressey of
sodomizing him in the school infirmary in 1966, after the headmaster had
brought him back to campus following hospital treatment for injuries sustained
when another student bullied and beat him. After the rape, according to the former
student, Kerressey threatened to keep him, a senior, from graduating if he told
anyone. The grown man claimed his life had been ruined, with suffering from
“…depression, affective disorder, rage attacks, sleep apnea…
attention/concentration deficit… is unable to hold a job or even at this point
work… has a poor self-image, and has been through three divorces,” according to
a Sept. 22, 1994, letter by the law firm of Eckert Seamans Cherin &
Mellott, which represented victims of Porter and Shanley.

From the 1969 St. John's Prep yearbook

Did Kerressey have more victims? The letter,
available on bishopaccountability.org, states: “Mr. [redacted] informs us that
it was well known among the students at St. John’s that Br. Ricardo favored
certain people. Br. Ricardo’s favoritism was based upon the student’s
availability to be sexually abused by Br. Ricardo. If one succumbed to Br.
Ricardo’s abuses, one was more successful at St. John’s.”

I look very differently
now at Brother Ricard’s smiling face in my Prep yearbooks.

As with other cases, we likely will never know the
full truth, since some of an abuser’s victims take their secrets with them to
the grave. Indeed, it is possible that some of my childhood friends and
classmates were abused but have never disclosed it. If so, I hope they, together
with all victims, can find peace in their later years, and if their healing
involves reporting long-ago abuse to law enforcement, I encourage them to do
so. It is never too late.

The record
is unclear on what action, if any, was taken against Kerressey, who left
St. John’s in 1971 after my junior year and died 26 years later. To its credit,
St. John’s in a more recent time moved responsibly against another brother and
a priest chaplain who were accused of abusing students. And the Archdiocese of
Boston -- headed now by a holy man, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who succeeded the unholy
and unrepentant Cardinal Bernard Law, in charge when many of the more than 800 known victims
allege they were abused -- has apologized, paid damages, sought justice and enacted
real protections.

We say this must never happen again. One way
toward that goal is never forgetting what happened, and what didn’t. Luck is
not enough to protect children.

Providence
Journal staff writer and author G. Wayne Miller graduated from St. John’s Prep
in 1972 and Harvard College in 1976. Read Horror at St. Georges, a Providence journal editorial on the unfolding scandal at that school.